Entries by Amy Mathews

Mary Anne Hitt has led Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign to extraordinary national success. But she honed her skills in Appalachia, with a little help from SkyTruth.

You might say Mary Anne Hitt has Appalachian activism in her blood. When she was growing up in Gatlinburg, Tennessee her father was Chief Scientist at Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Back then, acid rain was decimating high elevation forests in the East, fueled by pollution from coal-fired power plants. Her father watched as iconic places in the park turned into forests of skeleton trees. Today, Mary Anne is National Director of Campaigns for the Sierra Club; and she also serves on SkyTruth’s board of directors.

Ten years ago last week, BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 men and setting off the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. SkyTruth was there; not in person but remotely; using satellite imagery to track the spill from space. Watch our four-minute video to learn more about the disaster, and what SkyTruth is doing now to stop oil pollution at sea.

Oil pollution at sea, mountaintop mining, Conservation Vision and more on SkyTruth’s agenda.

SkyTruth followers know that we generated a lot of momentum in 2019, laying the groundwork for major impact in 2020. Here’s a quick list of some of our most important projects underway for the new year: stopping oil pollution at sea, protecting wildlife, identifying poorly reclaimed mine sites, characterizing harmful algal blooms from space, and revealing fossil fuel drilling on public lands.

A would-be diplomat discovered she could help others with technology.

Johnna Armstrong had, what she calls, a sheltered upbringing in a rural community in Upstate New York. The oldest of six children, she often had to care for her younger siblings. So when it came time for college she was anxious to find out “who I was separate from my family,” as she puts it. She had no idea that ultimately she would end up in the computer field. Now, she serves as SkyTruth’s systems administrator, keeping our systems humming, the website running, and managing the SkyTruth Alerts system.

SkyTruth’s goal to stop oil pollution at sea from bilge dumping is off to a strong start.

The call came two weeks in advance: SkyTruth was chosen to be one of four nonprofits featured at the AWS re:Invent Hackathon for Good held December 2, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Our goal: leveraging the collective brainpower of hackathon engineers to automate the detection of bilge dumping at sea by vessels violating international law and polluting the ocean.

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